After the initial creation of my Secondlife Flux Pony.
Someone else got inspired enough to make a working version of the backpack. [link]
So as expected – since my original concept was not a functional one – I upgraded my flux pony!
Oh and it got new goggles for a sleeker effect.

I dropped into an event at one of my regular hangouts. It was a surprise to see this event but I learned that this was from a crowd of people who do the occasional random parade at various locations throughout virtual world of Second Life.

I hoped to get a fair bit of video at the time but I ended up with some recording issues – either way I managed to get some reasonable footage to make up this video.

Ok so this is my montage of looking back on the year 2012. I’ll show you bits and peices of what has happened to me in 2012 – primarily from an online perspective.

The online areas I have been active in:

Social Media:

I have been mostly addicted to Facebook and Google+ where I have been posting many random things. I also have been maintaining a Twitter account but it has mostly been automated with anything I have liked or uploaded via Youtube. I have realised during 2012 that I have become addicted to some degree to the virtually real-time nature of status updates of friends. And since noticing some changes occur where facebook tried to bring in a “pay to promote” system where your posts are not seen by all friends unless you paid for each post. I have since started a progressive attempt to cut back my social media addiction by unsubscribing from friends I don’t think I need anymore (usually those I don’t really interact with and those who post nothing but boring stuff).

Part of me has been tempted to wipe facebook completely and heavily cull the other social media services – but I unfortunately have too many friends connected only via facebook that I would lose communication with some cool friends.

As for Google+ – I have had some interesting times with it so far. When they introduced the Hangouts feature I occasionally participated with a group called “Qwipster” which shows old public domain movies within the hangout for all participants to heckle at. And with the addition of the Communities feature things in Google+ have become an interesting place.

Virtual Worlds:

It’s been an eventful time for me in the virtual space. I had been an active volunteer administrator for the “ABC Island” (run by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation) simulator within Second Life. The admin experience has been quite an interesting one Where I attempted to help revive what was appearing as a dead community area.

An old view of the ABC Island before the revamp.

The ABC “virtual community” by this time had gone a bit stale, no events, very few admin online who were willing to deal with anything and the fact the place had not changed much for a long time. I decided the place needed a facelift and some design changes in order to prepare it for the revival of a community atmosphere so I helped/guided/encourages the remaining active admin members to join me in bringing a change of air into the location. The most successful part had been the new sandbox layout which allowed a more comfortable space for creativity. The other popular spot was the treetops cafe setup by Katisha where some virtual residents told me they liked to hang out there for the peace and quiet among a scenic area.

ABC Island after the major revamp.

During this whole time I knew it would end sooner or later since the ABC had basically lost interest in maintaining a presence within Secondlife. But at least during this time I had conducted a worthwhile experiment which had some successes in regaining visitor levels and began to respawn a community feeling (only downside for an Australian oriented location was that most visitors were anything but).

When the announcement came for the closing of ABC Island – it was interesting to see a lot of people appear out of the woodwork – most virtual Australians were only just realising that the place existed at all. (even though a few friends and I had made attempts in the past in promoting the island.) Either way it helped result in an awesome closing party where during the last hours we gradually sunk the ground into the water as we partied away on surrounding boats. I’d like to thank ABC for letting me have the opportunity to “have a go” at developing a virtual world.

Also within Secondlife I am an admin at the “Australia” simulator where during 2012 my admin powers have somewhat been increased there in order to help with dealing with greifers and other admin tasks around the place. So far the Australia sim has been one of the strongest remaining hangouts for Australians to hang out in. Some of the former crowds from the old Bigpond Estate have been known to drop in on occasion – resulting in some veteran secondlife users still finding each other here and there.

Aside from the Australian scene I have been lurking a bit more around some of the furry themed places in Secondlife – so far not finding anything special apart from meeting lots of interesting people… in furry outfits…

The two ladies that got me to do English Tutoring.

Somewhere along the line I have ended up running regular English Tutoring classes. I was mobbed one night as I teleported to the Australia land by two Japanese avatars who begged me to become their tutor. Since then I have been doing regular sessions with them. It started off as two 1 hour sessions a week but has now dropped to a single 1 hour session on late friday nights for me.

I have also started taking a look at alternate virtual worlds with the hope that one of them might one day shape up to become a possibly decent secondlife substitute. I have occasionally been helping out my friend Dogwomble in looking at developments of his own opensim based virtual world grid where development has been slow and the fundraising has not been great. The lack of crowdfunding is suggesting that the alternate grid project has been done a number of times by others in the past.

Creativity:

Towards the end of the year I started to suffer a bit of burnout of trying to do too many boring and stressful things all at once. In order to try combat the depression that was setting in I have taken to the arts for a way to try and keep my mind positive and possibly take myself into a new direction for 2013. Primarily I am planning on doing a series of funny/parody Youtube videos based on SecondLife and post a lot of cool cat photos and Secondlife related art via DeviantArt.

DeviantArt:

While getting an intense stare from a cat seems to impress many people. So does the occasional bits of virtual feminine beauty/sexyness. I’m likely to be posting more of the same into 2013 but hopefully in a year’s time we may see a different to 5 pics on the next review in a year’s time.

Done as a collaboration project with a friend where we did our own music videos after recording our avatars dancing in a line. One of the more properly done video edits I have achieved and has helped start my interest in doing machinima animation.

A few friends and I decided to try and do a silly video in Second Life.

2013 – Where to go from here?

At this point I am not really sure what I want to do in the long term. But for now I plan on uploading some more videos and pictures while continuing my secondlife addiction. As for everything else it’s hard to say what’s going to happen. One possible scenario is that I will become more involved in the other forms of Linux Games since the announcement that Valve Software is ramping up their support of Linux systems.